Coraline (film)

Coraline Jones struggles to adapt to her new life after she and her workaholic parents move from Pontiac, Michigan, to the Pink Palace Apartments in Ashland, Oregon. She meets the landlady's grandson, Wyborne "Wybie" Lovat, and a stray black cat. Later, Wybie retrieves a button-eyed ragdoll that eerily resembles Coraline from his grandmother's trunk and gives it to her. The doll guides Coraline to a small door in the apartment's living room that has a bricked up wall behind it.

That night, a mouse wakes Coraline up and guides her to the door, which is now a portal leading to a parallel universe that resembles the real world. Coraline then meets her Other Mother and Father, button-eyed doppelgängers of her parents who appear more attentive and caring. She returns home the next morning, where Wybie recounts the disappearance of his great aunt. Coraline's neighbors, Sergei Alexander Bobinsky, an eccentric Chernobyl liquidator-turned-gymnast who owns a mouse circus, and retired burlesque actresses April Spink and Miriam Forcible, cryptically warn her about imminent danger.

Despite the warnings, Coraline visits the Other World twice more. There, she, accompanied by the mute Other Wybie, is entertained by the dimension's doppelgängers of her neighbors and meets the cat, who has the abilities to traverse between the real world and the Other World and speak in the latter. On the third visit, the Other Mother offers Coraline the opportunity to stay in the Other World permanently, in exchange for having buttons sewn over her eyes. Horrified, Coraline tries to escape back to her world, but the Other Mother prevents her from doing so and imprisons her in a room behind a mirror. There, she meets the ghosts of the Other Mother's victims, one of them being Wybie's great aunt, who all call her the Beldam. They recount how the Beldam used the ragdoll, each time designed after the victim in question, to spy on them and lure them into the Other World. After they accepted the Beldam's offer of having buttons sewn over their eyes, she robbed them of their souls. The ghosts tell Coraline that the only way they can be freed is by retrieving the essences of the souls, which the Beldam has hidden throughout the Other World. After Coraline promises to do so, she is rescued by the Other Wybie, who helps her return home.

Upon her return, Coraline discovers that the Beldam has kidnapped her parents, forcing her to return to the Other World. Accompanied by the cat, Coraline proposes a game to the Beldam: if she can find her parents and the essences of her past victims' souls, they will all go free; if not, she will finally accept the Beldam's offer. The Beldam agrees and Coraline searches for the souls' essences, during which she discovers that the Beldam murdered the Other Wybie for his defiance. As she finds each of the soul's essences, parts of the Other World turn lifeless, leading to the entire dimension, except for the living room, eventually disintegrating.

Coraline then encounters the Beldam in her true arachnid-like form. Wybie's great aunt's ghost tells Coraline that the Beldam will not honor their bargain. Using this advice, Coraline tricks the Beldam into opening the door to the real world by claiming that her parents are behind it. After Coraline distracts the Beldam by throwing the cat at her, she rescues her parents, who are trapped in a snow globe. Coraline narrowly escapes through the door with the Beldam in pursuit and severs the Beldam's right hand in the process.

Back home, Coraline reunites with her parents, who have forgotten about their capture. That night, the ghosts appear in Coraline's dream and thank her for freeing them, but warn her that the Beldam is still after the key needed to unlock the door. Coraline decides to drop the key down an old well, but the Beldam's severed hand attacks her. Wybie soon arrives and, after a struggle, destroys the hand by dropping a large rock on it. The duo then toss the key and the hand's remnants into the well and seal it. The next day, Coraline and her parents host a party for their neighbors, including Wybie's grandmother, whom Coraline and Wybie prepare to tell about her missing sister's fate.

• Dakota Fanning as Coraline Jones
• Teri Hatcher as Melanie "Mel" Jones and The Beldam (also known as The Other Mother)
• Jennifer Saunders as April Spink and her Other World counterpart
• Dawn French as Miriam Forcible and her Other World counterpart
• John Hodgman as Charlie Jones and The Other Father
  • John Linnell provides the Other Father's singing voice
• Robert Bailey Jr. as Wyborne "Wybie" Lovat
• Keith David as The Cat
• Ian McShane as Sergei Alexander Bobinsky and his Other World counterpart
• Carolyn Crawford as Mrs. Lovat
• Aankha Neal, George Selick, and Hannah Kaiser as the Ghost Children
• Marina Budovsky and Harry Selick as Coraline's friends back in Pontiac, Michigan

Director Henry Selick met author Neil Gaiman just as Gaiman was finishing the novel Coraline, and given that Gaiman was a fan of Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas, he invited him to make a possible film adaptation. As Selick thought a direct adaptation would lead to "maybe a 47-minute movie", his screenplay had some expansions, such as the creation of Wybie, who was not present in the original novel. When looking for a design away from that of most animation, Selick discovered the work of Japanese illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi and invited him to become the concept artist. One of Uesugi's biggest influences was on the color palette, which was muted in reality and more colorful in the Other World, similar to The Wizard of Oz.[9] Uesugi declared that "at the beginning, it was supposed to be a small project over a few weeks to simply create characters; however, I ended up working on the project for over a year, eventually designing sets and backgrounds, on top of drawing the basic images for the story to be built upon."[10]

Coraline was staged in a 140,000-square-foot (13,000 m²) warehouse in Hillsboro, Oregon.[8][11] The stage was divided into 50 lots,[12] which played host to nearly 150 sets.[8] Among the sets were three miniature Victorian mansions, a 42-foot (12.8 m) apple orchard, and a model of Ashland, Oregon, including tiny details such as banners for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.[11] More than 28 animators worked at a time on rehearsing or shooting scenes, producing 90–100 seconds of finished animation each week.[13] To capture stereoscopy for the 3D release, the animators shot each frame from two slightly apart camera positions.[9]

Every object on screen was made for the film.[9] The crew used three 3D printing systems from Objet in the development and production of the film. Thousands of high-quality 3D models, ranging from facial expressions to doorknobs, were printed in 3D using the Polyjet matrix systems, which enable the fast transformation of CAD (computer-aided design) drawings into high-quality 3D models.[14] The puppets had separate parts for the upper and lower parts of the head that could be exchanged for different facial expressions,[9] and the characters of Coraline could potentially exhibit over 208,000 facial expressions.[14] Computer artists composited separately-shot elements together, or added elements of their own, which had to look handcrafted instead of computer-generated – for instance, the flames were done with traditional animation and painted digitally, and the fog was dry ice.[9]

At its peak, the film involved the efforts of 450 people,[8] including from 30[11] to 35[8] animators and digital designers in the Digital Design Group (DDG), directed by Dan Casey, and more than 250 technicians and designers.[11] One crew member, Althea Crome, was hired specifically to knit miniature sweaters and other clothing for the puppet characters, sometimes using knitting needles as thin as human hair.[8] The clothes also simulated wear using paint and a file.[9]

The soundtrack for Coraline features songs composed by French composer Bruno Coulais, with one ("Other Father Song") by They Might Be Giants. The Other Father's singing voice is provided by John Linnell, one of the singers from the band. They had initially written 10 songs for the film; when a melancholy tone was decided, all but one were cut. Coulais' score was performed by the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra and features choral pieces sung by the Children's Choir of Nice in a nonsense language.[15] Selick mentions that the main soloist, "a young girl you hear singing in several parts of the film," is coincidentally named Coraline.[15] Coraline won Coulais the 2009 Annie Award for best score for an animated feature.

Coraline was theatrically released on February 6, 2009.[4]

• List of ghost films

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• Official website
• Coraline at IMDb
• Coraline at The Big Cartoon DataBase
• Coraline at AllMovie
• Coraline at Rotten Tomatoes
• Coraline at Metacritic
• Coraline at Box Office Mojo
• Coraline script at the Internet Movie Script Database